One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (Hercule Poirot 23)

Alistair Blunt looked unhappy.

Hercule Poirot said:

“You have a young gardener, I noticed, whom I think you must have taken on recently.”

“I daresay,” said Blunt. “Yes, Burton, my third gardener, left about three weeks ago, and we took this fellow on instead.”

“Do you remember where he came from?”

“I really don’t. MacAlister engaged him. Somebody or other asked me to give him a trial, I think. Recommended him warmly. I’m rather surprised, because MacAlister says he isn’t much good. He wants to sack him again.”

“What is his name?”

“Dunning—Sunbury—something like that.”

“Would it be a great impertinence to ask what you pay him?”

“Not at all. Two pounds fifteen, I think it is.”

“Not more?”

“Certainly not more—might be a bit less.”

“Now that,” said Poirot, “is very curious.”

Alistair Blunt looked at him inquiringly.

But Jane Olivera, rustling the paper, distracted the conversation.

“A lot of people seem to be out for your blood, Uncle Alistair!”

“Oh, you’re reading the debate in the House. That’s all right. Only Archerton—he’s always tilting at windmills. And he’s got the most crazy ideas of finance. If we let him have his way, England would be bankrupt in a week.”

Jane said:

“Don’t you ever want to try anything new?”

“Not unless it’s an improvement to the old, my dear.”

“But you’d never think it would be. You’d always say, ‘This would never work’—without even trying.”

“Experimentalists can do a lot of harm.”

“Yes, but how can you be satisfied with things as they are? All the waste and the inequality and the unfairness. Something must be done about it!”

“We get along pretty well in this country, Jane, all things considered.”

Jane said passionately:

“What’s needed is a new heaven and a new earth! And you sit there eating kidneys!”

She got up and went out by the french window into the garden.

Alistair looked mildly surprised and a little uncomfortable.

He said: “Jane has changed a lot lately. Where does she get all these ideas?”

“Take no notice of what Jane says,” said Mrs. Olivera. “Jane’s a very silly girl. You know what girls are—they go to these queer parties in studios where the young men have funny ties and they come home and talk a lot of nonsense.”